Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday July 22, 2010 @04:33PM
from the but-I-almost-coulda-done-that dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Since Wired's Jeff Howe coined the term in 2006, 'crowdsourcing' has been a buzzword in the tech industry, and a business model on the rise. 99designs.com is a site that hosts design contests for small businesses requiring relatively smaller design projects. Anyone can submit their near finished pieces of work to the contests, but only one winner gets paid. Forbes covers just why established graphic designers are so angry at this business model's catching on."

Which means that everyone else that submits work has essentially done so for free. No one would want to work like that, and such crowdsourcing is in no way a viable path for real, fulltime employment. Besides, I'd be just as worried as a client. I post vague specifications and hope for the best? That's asinine. Good design work requires that the artist and the client work back and forth, improving and changing the product little by little until both are satisfied. You don't get that here. What you get with crowdsourcing is mostly mediocrity. Why invest tons of effort into something that you very likely will not get paid for?

99% of everything is crap. That'll be true for crowdsourcing and traditional models.

Everyone wants a crowdsourced model when they're buying, and no one wants it when they're selling. Do you think the grocery store wants you to pick the nicest looking apples from the pile? Of course not. Do you? Of course you do.

That's not a better analogy. It's actually quite terrible. Nothing is taken from the designers that they did not agree to and readily give. The "bitten apple" analogy is completely skewed, otherwise nobody would choose the designers that were rejected once. Their career would be over the second they were no longer in 1st place.

Thinking on this further, I agree that last one is the most accurate. The apples that don't get picked are still as salable as they ever were, no one is getting something for free. To beat this analogy into a greasy horse shaped patch on the ground, apples were previously only sold in apple boutiques where you bought apples from elite growers and if you wanted different apples, you had to drive to a different boutique. Now the apples are sold in a farmers' market where anyone can set up a stall, even crabap

You're not a professional designer, are you? Lots of established designers will not get involved with speculative pitches because working for no money is just stupid. Yes, you can be pitted against other designers but your portfolio, and contact with the client to see if you get along, should be enough. It's normally only those designers who don't have a track record that are prepared to work for no money. When I was starting out I used a few speculative pitches to build my portfolio but now I wouldn't consider that.

If the design isn't picked, the designer still owns all rights to it and can submit it again.

Um, you might want to read the "contract" very carefully. Most such contests have wording hidden out in the fine print to the effect that all submissions become the property of the company running the contest. So if 1000 people submit entries, the company pays for one of them, but legally owns the other 999. Read the tiny language that comes with most such contests, and see if you can spot where it says this. They can be clever at obfuscating the wording, but with careful reading you can usually spot it.

I've seen a couple of writing contests run by publishers that play the same trick. The top-rated 2 or 3 stories get a reward, but the publisher publishes an entire book of the top N stories. If the authors of the other stories complain, the publisher just quotes the above passage from the contest rules, and refuses to pay anything to the other "losing" authors.

(This is all in the USA; other countries may outlaw such misleading trickery. But probably not many countries do. Anyone here have any data about this?)

> "Real" designers work the same way, often developing several candidates for consideration or being pitted against other designers.

Uh, poor designers work the same way. "Oh, I get a portfolio item, THANK YOU" is not a business model.

The real story is that bad-to-average design is no longer scarce. The tools are ubiquitous, and many people play with them. So you're going to see a tiered economy: the wannabes doing spec work for minimum wage on places like istockphoto.com and the golden glorious few doing high touch client-focused work for $200 an hour. Similar to whats happening in photography and journalism, and for much the same reasons.

My design firm charges by the hour. If you want a logo that we did in an hour, we can do that, in an hour. The prices is one times our hourly rate. It is not going to be the best logo, but it will only take us one hour.

If you want to have two planning conference calls, a focus group, then six rounds of comps and five final versions for various mediums, a favicon, a 125x125 banner and more, then it cost as much as time as it takes.

If clients do not like this, then can negotiate the world of crowd-sourceing, getting a cousin to do it and mocking it up themselves.

The problem with all that is that if you want a change later on, you are on your own, If you need a two color version for a silk screen, you might be SOL. If your cheap logo is not 100% vector, good luck putting it on a billboard or wrapping a vehicle.

Just as anyone can work on their own plumbing or get some cheap person to do it, there will always be a market for creative professionals who know what they are doing.

If you are losing work to the design sites, you don't want those clients anyways. Or you can let them get their logo from a contest, then design their business cards, website, make money brokering their ads/print/etc/, and create a long term relationship. That could happen as well.

I compare the risk of designers being crowdsourced as similar to the risk of engineering jobs being outsourced.
It was only a matter of time before this would start to happen.
In the same way that news reporters may be getting replaced by Twitter, the Phone book may be getting replaced with Facebook, and CDs were replaced with MP3s.
You just gotta take the change and live with it, all professions will be effected as technology, the internet, and massive scale multi-user interactions become more pervasive

Freelance writers have long complained of similar practices amongst "content mills" such as Demand Studios (the guys behind all those "how to" webpages). The mill pays $3/story, $15/video. For a working writer or videographer, it's the kind of revenue that puts the "chump" into "chump change." But -- and here's the catch -- thousands and thousands of people will work for this! Many full-time writers sneer at them as mere wannabes who are pissing into the community pool, but their work is (apparently) good enough for The Client, and these folks are happy to be making some beer money "writing professionally." The thing is, there are so many writers -- and designers, too, apparently -- and the bar for entry into the profession is so low, and the, well, "romance/coolness" of being a paid (however niggardly) creative artiste is so great, that the Content Mills have such low overhead they are making money hand-over-fist.

Of course, if you're really good at what you do, you get to name your price and you do well. But if you're in the bottom 90 percent of a profession whose products -- such as words and designs -- aren't constrained by artificial geographical boundaries and location (thanks to this new-fangled Internet thingy) then, brother, you are scrapping and scrambling.

From my point of view the word niggardly is a bit obscure, rarely used and bound to be misunderstood. I think it is best avoided. There are plenty of other words with the same meaning. The dictionary entry you reference above indicates that misunderstanding can arise.

I read it as "only one winner gets laid" which made me think of the following analogy: It's like that girl who goes around accepting drinks from all the guys at the bar, but only goes home with one of them. Sadly, that's still a popular business model.

This is no different than Expedia disrupting the travel agent industry, iStockPhoto allowing designers to buy photos shot by amateurs for $1, or eTrade allowing people to do their own stock trading for $9 a piece.

The only people that complain about disruptive innovation are those directly affected by it. Gone are the days when you can charge $5000 for 3 logo concepts when some college student is happy to spend 2 hours cranking out a concept in his spare time for the chance at winning $269 - the price quoted on the 99designs logo design page [99designs.com].

Gone are the days when you can charge $5000 for 3 logo concepts when some college student is happy to spend 2 hours cranking out a concept in his spare time for the chance at winning $269 - the price quoted on the 99designs logo design page.

I've given up working with ODesk. What looked like a good idea turned out to be a exercise in futility competing against =$10/hr programmers in India. Quality-be-damned, the client always picks the lowest price.

I've recently taken over a codebase written by a Ukrainian who believed that by naming your files model.php, view.php and controller.php magically turned applications into MVC frameworks. Of course, the pitch was that he would code in MVC. It turns out that meant My Value is Crap.

It's like rent-a-coder... no American can earn a living doing piecework for rent-a-coder. Most would be better off working at McDonalds. Same thing's going to happen for piecework design.

This happened about a decade ago in my field (translation) with sites like proz.com and later translatorscafe.com - there are other sites doing the same thing, but these are the two largest. It's a bidding race to the bottom with India and China.

And those of us who live in the US and Europe have been complaining about it ever since.

But then you get to a point where you realize that you don't want that kind of client anyway. And there are still many clients out there willing to pay the rate you want/deserve.

I'm very curious about this. I worked for a packaging design firm for a while, and my company was very interested in cracking the India market. There seemed to be a huge opportunity in packaged goods there, as a new affluent class gradually trended toward American-style consumerism.

The problem? Graphic design is ultimately about communication -- often in very subtle, even subliminal ways -- and we, as Americans, simply didn't understand how the Indian mindset worked. We got someone to scour some shelves in India and bring back some successful Indian products, and their packaging was pretty much baffling to our designers. Who was this character pictured on the front of the box? What values did he represent to the consumer? Why this choice of typeface? It was in Indian script, but was this type modern or classical? Why use English here, but not here? Why would a tube of toothpaste be completely colored green -- did green have some special significance to Indians that we didn't understand? And so on.

I can't help but wonder whether graphic designers who had spent their entire lives in India or China would struggle with designing for American markets in the same way.

Gone are the days when you can charge $5000 for 3 logo concepts when some college student is happy to spend 2 hours cranking out a concept in his spare time for the chance at winning $269

The trouble is apply this to every industry and all of a sudden it's not overcharging fat cats that add no value that are affect: Suddenly there is no way to make a decent living. The only industries that survive are the ones that require qualifications.

In other words I agree that charging $5000 for 3 logo concepts isn't necessarily reasonable, but I don't want to see only amateurs compete for a single prize pool of $269 either. Effectively most people are working for free. That's not reasonable either. Sur

The trouble is apply this to every industry and all of a sudden it's not overcharging fat cats that add no value that are affect: Suddenly there is no way to make a decent living. The only industries that survive are the ones that require qualifications.

In other words I agree that charging $5000 for 3 logo concepts isn't necessarily reasonable, but I don't want to see only amateurs compete for a single prize pool of $269 either. Effectively most people are working for free. That's not reasonable either. Surely there's a middle ground?

Nope. Welcome to globalization! Billions of third world people just waiting to do what you do for 1/10th the price. Expect your living standard to trend towards theirs, because if it's one thing this planet has, it's a huge excess of available labor.

If you can make your process require less fewer skills, you can pay less for the labour to enable it.

Hence robots welding cars. Hence McDonalds having a very clear procedure for EVERY task in their restaurants, very clearly laid out in the three-ring binder, as well as timers on their clamshell grill and pictures of hamburgers on their point of sale tills, and most importantly, factories that produce pre-prepared food items ready to shove in the grill or the fryer.

But typically with crowd sourcing, each of the contestants needs to submit something in order to be payed. Expedia doesn't let you try all the flights and then just pay for the one you like best. The competition is good. The need for everyone to provide services without getting paid isn't so much.

And really, I'm glad to see them going - despite doing some small work in the industry. Here's the skinny:

My girlfriend works for a conservational society downtown, at a place called the Lougheed House. Peter Lougheed was one of the biggest founders of this city. Even today he has a provincial park and a hospital named after him. His House with it's massive garden is still downtown, surrounded by giant hotels, but still standing with most of its original decorations. They've turned the grand dining hall into an expensive restaurant, and there were some additions to the house during the world wars, but for the most part, its as original as it can be.

A few years ago, they hired a guy, we'll call him "Ted" - to design a web page. I'm not entirely familiar with how much was involved, but in the end - the website is hosted online - and is considered property of the Lougheed House. However, they have no idea who is hosting it, how to access any administrative tools, nothing like that. Anytime they want to make a change, they call up Ted and Ted makes the updates for them. He charges $40 for this.

So after the marketting team went to a presentation from the Ex-president of Critical Mass, they have decided that web-marketting is something they really need to pick up on. They've started a facebook page, twitter, a blog, etc. They want to keep their website up to date more often. Monthly news postings, etc etc. My girlfriend, she's not exactly in the marketting team but more like an event co-ordinator also got to attend this meeting (and was rubbing it in my face that she got to go while I was working. And apparently there was a devilled egg tray!). So she approached me afterwards, asking how difficult it is to update a website, because they don't want to spend $40 every time they want to make a change.

And I told her, it all depends on what you want to change, and how you want to change it. She said they mostly just want to change a few images, update it with some info, not really template or layout changing, just words and pictures. And so I told her, its pretty simple, HTML is easy enough for a noobie to edit. You can, in fact, ignore all the code, look for the section you want to edit, and just change whats between the tags. As for images, its as easy as either overwriting the old image, or putting the new one in the same place and changing the reference in the html to the new image.

Excited about this, she told her boss. Upon this, they consulted with TED about what they wanted to do, and TED offered that he would make them a CMS (content management system) for $30,000 if they want. Not only do they not have that kind of money, but I already told them how to make the changes they want. The only thing they need is access to whatever FTP or hosting company they are using - I imagine Ted is the only one with the credentials to actually upload to the webserver. It sounds like he is going to hand it over, though, and not hold things hostage, which is good.

No matter how much my girlfriend tries to relay my information, they want me to come in and consult with their marketting team. They will pay me (more than my current job) for my time, and deliver a free lunch. I think Monday, I never enjoy Mondays so I think I'll take it off from work and do something fun like teach people HTML & CSS.

Anyways, the point is, I'm tired of companies and contractors trying to over-inflate prices to make more money than they really deserve. Don't get me wrong, design can be a tricky business. But if you are a professional designer, and you can truly produce some stuff better than anyone else, you shouldn't have an issue with crowdsourcing. Some college person spending his off hours on a design SHOULD NOT be able to compare with your product which you have spent all your work experience developing the necessary skills to come out on top.

Gone are the days when you can charge $5000 for 3 logo concepts when some college student is happy to spend 2 hours cranking out a concept in his spare time for the chance at winning $269 - the price quoted on the 99designs logo design page [99designs.com].

Then go ahead and do that! Except you get what you pay for.

Disclaimer: I've been close to the results of both approaches (not 99designs, it was something else)

From the crowdsourcing site you get a nice drawing

From the 5k for concepts you get:-concept that's a close fit for your needs-"tech docs and support" (yes, you need it)- a visual identity for your product/company

So yeah, go ahead and do it. Or you can ask your nephew who's good at Corel Draw to make something for you for $10, that's even cheaper.

Piecework is basically bullshit. It's effectively hiring 10 people to do a job and then only paying one of them (at most). It's basically using the fact that they're "Contests" to stiff 99% of the people in the business.

On the other hand, the times are changing and you have to either adapt of die. You can't really rage against the fact that globalization increases competition.

You could convince the/b/tards that this is a fun way to fuck with The Man... Anyone can set up as a designer. Then the signal to noise on 99 designs will drop through the floor and it'll be 99 Designs that has to adapt or die.

My first job out of college many years ago was as a tech writer. I got 'synergized' into also being responsible for producing marketing materials (because I had a Mac, and had figured out how to use Adobe Illustrator and Quark and etc.). It seemed potentially fun at first. I read a few books on graphic design, and pestered a couple of buddies of mine where were employed as actual designers for tips and critiques of my first efforts, which they thought pretty impressive.

It's effectively hiring 10 people to do a job and then only paying one of them (at most). It's basically using the fact that they're "Contests" to stiff 99% of the people in the business.

While that's true, it is also an established business model in many fields. For example, Advertising Agencies, or Architects, TV Pilots, or Engineering firms competing for tenders and contracts. Often they have to do a lot of the work, without ever knowing if they win the contract.

They hate it for the same reason that the music industry hates the Internet, they lose control of the marketplace and are unable to charge a premium for intangibles. Basically, the established design professionals are used to being able to charge more than the value they add to the product because it was too hard to find good alternatives. I am not saying that experienced, quality design professionals do not add significant value over most of what you can get from crowd sourcing sites. It's just that they want to charge more for that value than what it is worth in today's marketplace. When it was hard to find people who had a natural talent for design for a particular product or market segment, it was worth paying more for people who were proven at creating good designs for many different areas and additionally had experience in what types of design seem good in development, but turn out to be bad ideas in production. Now that it is easier to find people who are inexperienced, but have a natural talent, that experience is less valuable.

They hate it for the same reason that the music industry hates the Internet, they lose control of the marketplace and are unable to charge a premium for intangibles.

It's not "a premium for intangibles." It's the opportunity to get get paid for your time vs the expectation that you'll work for free unless your work is utilized.

What do you do? You an IT worker like most of the site? Let's say you troubleshoot systems -- how about we say that you don't get anything old fashioned like a salary or an hourly wage anymore: instead, you'll compete with others to see who can find/fix the problem first. The person who does that gets paid a flat rate. Everyone else gets nothing. Or, let's say you write code. You and one hundred other coders provide to spec. First one gets something, everyone else doesn't. No messy employee-employer relationship -- that stuff is for communists and music industry racketeers, right? Just pure market transactions. Beautiful, right? Certainly nothing you could have any complaint against -- in fact, if you really believe in your comment, truly and deeply, back it up: suggest that arrangement to your employer tomorrow.

After all, you wouldn't want to be like a music industry dinosaur, and frankly, if you're drawing either a salary or hourly wage off of it, you're exactly as much like the music industry as a graphic designer.

A bunch of people working in a saturated job market are pissed off they might have to compete for jobs in a different manner?

Sounds to me like they don't want to actually produce a product and have the customer pay for the one they like best. They would much rather sign the customer to a contract and make money whether or not the end product would have made the customer the happiest.

Seems like a win-win for the customer and the market. The customer gets the product he wants and the people that make superi

Sounds to me like there's a supply and demand problem for these established designers... namely there's too much supply for the available demand.

I understand their position: for someone outside of the design industry, it can be difficult to know who to go to with a project. So large, established designers get good business, just because they have enough of a reputation to appeal to the more conservative business types. But the prices they're charging are well above the market optimum, and they thrive off of imperfect knowledge in their client base. An organization like 99designs.com gives small, unknown, but potentially talented players access to the client base that has typically been reserved for the big guys. This drives the actual price of services (when amortized over all the work that doesn't get paid for) down to the actual economic optimum.

In other words, it's an industry bitching about the internet killing their business model. Yawn.

Designers, like everyone else in service industries, are competing against everyone in the market. There's no more hiding. You have to demonstrate value. It's not easy to show non-designers what the value of good design is, but good designers are effective communicators; if you can't communicate your value to clients, you shouldn't expect them to pay the rates many designers are used to charging.
On the flip side, I'm reminded of this reminder [37signals.com] of the value a truly skilled, experienced designer can deliver.

You joke, but most businesses rely on their ability to project sober professionalism and seriousness. People who don't understand that Comic Sans (I know, I just font-Godwinned myself here) deteriorates that image of professionalism rather than merely communicating "informal" or "fun" (often when neither is even appropriate in the first place) shouldn't be designing anything that represents their company. And if they're in charge of paying someone else to design it, they should take advantage of that desi

After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with which he made a scab. A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles. When a scab comes down the street, men turn their backs and Angels weep in Heaven, and the Devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out....

Attributed to Jack London, but there's not really any proof he wrote it.

It's the same in any industry...once a group of people figure out how to make an income they then put bureaucratic barriers (e.g. legal, regulatory, educational, or certification requirements) in place. They then develop their own lexicon which future puts an informal educational barrier in place and they treat anyone who doesn't speak their cant as an outsider. It's a natural evolution where they try to protect their income by making it harder for the 2nd, 3rd, and 5th person through the door to accomplish what they have. This of course struggles against technology and innovation which is making it easier and eventually innovation overcomes the barriers but in the mean time the dinosaurs fight ferociously to live in the manner they have become accustomed to. See RIAA, MPAA, Software Patents, all certified careers, etc. etc. etc.

Then you see the same design has been shopped around to every other site, including your direct competitors.

Then you see that this "design in a box" approach actually handily ignored many of your stated requirements in your original request.

All this to save a few bucks on design by farming it out to people who do this for literally a few bucks a job. You get what you pay for: a $50 design that looks cookie cutter (because it is), and is designed by "e-lancers" from India and China who didn't understand all of your requirements and in most cases, didn't have time to care, because they'll only see $10 of it.

I've voted on about 10+ logo competitions on one of these sites and I haven't seen any "design in a box" regurgitated designs (at least in the good designs, there are always a few that look like they were done by 12 year olds who just learned about filters, or did one web2.0 style tutorial). There is a market for this service and obviously people with talent who are willing to design stuff for the sake of design. Heck, if I had better skil

In my rhetorical example (which isn't really rhetorical, as I've known two people to whom it's happened to), people don't find out their design is offered to multiple sites unless they look at their competitors' offers on 99designs.com, go to their websites after they've already picked a winner, or someone tells them.

People who think 99designs.com is a good way to save a few bucks for important work that represents their company generally aren't aware of the drawbacks. They just want a website or logo that

You guys always act as this is some kind of law of nature or something. By now, it's just a saying, and sayings may capture some common sense in some situations, but they carry very little weight in any argument.

While clients may or may not be getting "Walmart-quality" designs, they're certainly paying Walmart prices. Logo payouts can run as low as $211, while a webpage design package starts at just $499--rates considered absurdly low by some in the business.

Hate to be the one tell you artists this, but that's hardly low. Lots of people simply google for attractive website templates and pay $50 them, or some small amount to get them exclusively.

For those who want more custom work, places like vworker, freelancer, etc. have an abundance of people who'll do graphic design work for peanuts. True, it may not be as fantabulous as something costing thousands, but you can get a logo design for $20 and for 80% of the people in the marketplace, it's good enough to have your company's name in some sort of distinctive design.

The world is lousy with art students and third world people with cracked copies of Photoshop. Graybeards from the 80s are annoyed that this work is no longer geographically bound and the Internet has made cheap labor abundant. Not everything about the Internet is good for every person.

That I should go check Renta-A-Coder to see if there is any well paying work available!

$6/hr is a great wage if you have a 3rd-world cost-of-living. Wage earners in the USA are getting fucked career by career. I sense the return of unions, or something like them, on the horizon. When the downsides[1] of dog-eat-dog exceed the upsides[2] for average people, you will see change.

[1] Career turmoil and stress

[2] $4 lawn-chairs

Every company that harbors a union and has non-union competition either ends up successfully unionizing the competition, or in bankruptcy. The result is invariable, because labor costs are ultimately, the one cost that is unique to a given company. All other costs can be duplicated / reduced to the lowest common denominator. So if your labor costs more than your competition, then the competition slowly drives you out of business. Unions are good for protecting workers from their own greedy bosses. There is

Frankly, I can see why they're angry. This business model reduces their profession to amateur hour - and it can only hurt it in the long run.

I've worked in both the public and private sector. There is a reputable way to select somebody for a contract in a competitive setting. It's called a request for a quote, or RFQ (or request for a proposal, RFP). A general call goes out to businesses and people in the required industry. Proposals are collected, with projected timelines, pricings, and samples. Then, a decision is made, and the winner gets the contract. The losers go on to bid on other contracts.

The point, though, is that the time spent producing the final product is spent only by the winner. Everybody else moves on.

Now, that's the right way to do it. What's described in the article is the wrong way to do it. Imagine, for a moment, that you're a web site designer (I know the article is about graphic designers, but bear with me here). How would you feel if instead of preparing a proposal for a part of a website, you had to prepare the entire finished product - and then, after those hours of work (that could have been spent on working for a paying client, or in finding a paying client), you find out that somebody else got the contract, and therefore you get nothing?

Somehow, I think you'd be pretty pissed off too.

Now, this may be fine if you're just starting out, but it's not going to sit well once you've got a few years of experience under your belt. The really good people are going to get sick of it and do one of two things - they'll either leave that model and just work for the people who will treat them like professionals, or they'll leave the field itself.

Will amateur hour be cheaper than dealing with professionals? Absolutely. But, in the long run, it will drive the real talent out, and that will just make the field poorer.

I once had a graphics designer go completely ape at me when a buddy of mine asked how to put up a website, and I carefully explained to him how I could get a 'website' up and certainly work out the infrastructure side of things, but it would be a basic piece of HTML with no style or design etc. but yes I could show him how to get something up on the web. The graphics designer at the table immediately flipped his lid and started haranguing me on how thats not a website, its

If you want to earn a living in the design business you anly have a limited amount of hours a day to do that. That means you can't afford to work for free, which is essentially what you did if yiu don't win. I know that this is what's happening when big ad agencies "pitch" to a client, but they make it up by adding these hours to the bill for the next client where they win a pitch. On sites driven by cost competitiveness like 99designs this will be difficult.
And then i don't want to work for a client who

Any profitable business is based on some barrier for entry for competitors. When the barrier gets lower, the profitability inevitably goes down to zero as a result of unhindered competition. This is called free market.Being angry about this is like being angry at gravity or evolution.

In an unregulated environment, the free market is only a transitory stage on the way to a marketplace dictated by trusts and cartels.

Foolish people don't realize that a market must be regulated to remain free. If the market is totally free, the most dominant and predatory businesses will destroy the smaller ones and then use their uncontested market power to create an "unfree" market that minimizes competition and decreases the cost of production (like wages). Late nineteenth century/early twentieth century history provides many examples of this (look at the railroads!).

So, when you compare the free market to gravity or evolution, you are just being silly.

I do agree that this is a free market situation, though. It looks like a certain category of designers is way overpricing themselves. This appears analogous to what happens to movie script writers--they're so eager to get creative acknowledgement that they virtually give their work away to Hollywood sharks.

There are competitive alternatives to this model. Quality designers could form cooperatives and market themselves online, for example.

Threadless has been very successful crowd sourcing designs for shirts, wall clings, etc. I have seen Hanes and other big names try and get on the 'clever/funny t-shirt' money train, but their stuff is horrid. I don't think any design 'team' could ever do better job with this type of thing than one person with some decent software, a Wacom tablet, and a really great idea. What's more, Threadless pays a few hundred bucks the most highly voted designs.

The problem that 99designs solves is that most clients don't need a $20,000 design and don't have $20,000 to spend.

Years ago I worked for a company that made point of sale systems. They had a logo that looked like a monogram on someone's shirt. It was drawn by a marketing VP who had no design experience, in the early days of the company. Eventually it became an embarrassment and they hired a consultant who made a new logo, new letterhead, etc., for $80,000.

But the thing is that they only sold to industry and didn't need that degree of expertise. Something from 99designs would have been good enough, and if it happened to look exactly like the logo some real estate management startup in Boise, Idaho was using, too, so what.
Since then I've worked for a bunch of startups and the logo and website design has always been a problem. Usually it gets done by somebody's kid or somebody's friend, because startups don't want to spend thousands of dollars on a logo unless they're selling a consumer product.

Look at it from the other direction. I have a very skilled friend that's having a hard time making money off the graphical design business because he hasn't made a name for himself yet. He uses that site to collect money to pay bills as his contributions are just as likely to get picked as someone with a big name because the exposure is similar for all 'contestants'.

There are various "coders for hire" sites and such like that. The sites do well, but they are not truly disruptive to the software industry. This is because few professional programmers will put the time and effort into going there because the rates are terrible. And few serious companies use it because they can't get quality for the prices they are offering. But bored students, the unemployed, a few freelancers, and inhabitants of undeveloped nations will look for work there.

The question is: what percentage of the demand for this product can be met by that market segment?

It may turn out that the average corporation can't tell a good design from a bad one. If so, then graphic designers will start to go out of business until either the corporations realize that their designs aren't working, or until graphic designers realize that design quality doesn't actually matter. I suspect reality lies somewhere in between: cruddy designs are good enough for a lot of the market. Only the best designers will survive to get the remaining high-end contracts.

Let me preface this by saying that I know it's probably going to sound fruity among the Slashdot populace which thinks that it needs to be quantifiable to be worthwhile.

I have two points to make. The first is one of what Werner Herzog calls the "Inadequate Imagery" of our time. To quote Herzog on Herzog, "I have often spoken of what I call the inadequate imagery of today's civilization. I have the impression that the images that surround us today are worn out; they are abused and useless and exhausted. They are limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution."

Businesspeople think in numbers, sales figures and short-term profits; not in visual aestheticism and subtlety. Presented with many, many options for promotional materials, they will usually choose what is safely cliche and what they think is "good enough". The point I'm trying to make with this is that crowdsourcing does not find the best (and not the best for the business, either).

This brings me nicely to my second point, which can also be summed nicely in a quote (which I'm paraphrasing because I cannot find the source at the moment): "Advertising is a unique business in that your wealthiest client can demand your worst product while your poorest client must humbly accept your best."

You are the poorest judge of yourself because you can only perceive yourself as you always have. A business is the same way: you can say that your business is about this and about that, but your customers' perception of you is your only true face. Crowdsourcing typically involves a business micromanaging every detail of a project in which they have no expertise ("we want a bold logo with a strong corporate message about blah blah blah, and it has to have these colours and these shapes and these words and blah blah blah").

A good designer and advertiser will develop an actual, face-to-face relationship with the business, be able to perceive it with fresh eyes and use their expertise to design the best possible outcome for the long term.

I recently sponsored my first two 99Designs contests, and it was (for the most part) a throughly pleasant experience. I paid $250 (plus fees) for a great logo. My local designer would have charged me $750. Oh, his absurd logo price schedule: $400 for non-profits, $750 for normal companies, and $1500 for big fish. Yea, you read me right. Nothing to do with effort. Based on ability to pay - charge what the traffic will bear. Is that a better system than 99design?

(The one negative was excessive nannying by 99Design staff and the "sour grapes" reaction by some contestants when I permitted a design to make use of a tracing of a photograph. The designer disclosed that to me, I gave him permission, and it turned out to be the winning design. Unfortunately, 99Design suspended the contestant for 7 days. Thank you very much, but let ME manage my legal risk. But they did pay him the prize money. Now, had somebody pointed-out the tracing before the contest was over, or at least before the winner was chosen, it would have been USEFUL to me. Instead, they waited till it was all over - and so it was just obstructive. In fact, I will probably have the traced part of the logo re-done, using the original tracing only as inspiration. I love the DESIGN CONCEPT and it is a starting point. I would have never come up with that logo design myself, and the tracing is just one element that can certainly be re-drawn from scratch. Contestants and 99Design staff DO NOT KNOW whether the logo will be used commercially as-is, and shouldn't make assumptions.)

Yes, there are poor-quality Chinese and Indian (gotta pick on SOMEBODY) entries. And they were obviously low-quality I eliminated them early on. I never eliminated a DESIGNER (something you CAN do), and in fact one of designers of the early low-quality entries listened to feedback well enough to ultimately come very close to winning. BTW, the Chinese designers tend to have horrible typefaces, so they get eliminated on that if you have any taste at all. Yes, some of the designers have poor or no English skills, so that feedback is nearly impossible. But they still see other's designs and your "star ratings" of designs (unless you run a "blind" contest) and so they still can see the direction you are going. Myself, I prefer to work with the designers that have excellent English skills making feedback effective. There's no lack of designers with excellent English skills.

It's important to provide feedback. I gave plenty, and the designers appreciated it.

Sometimes you get a great result through feedback and iteration. Sometimes a great design just drops out of the sky. The winner of my logo contest worked his ass of making change after change at my request. My second choice just swooped-in with a beautiful, simple design that required just a single iteration - to change the colors in the company name. I told him "don't change a thing - it is perfect". (The second choice was really a much better logo - it just wasn't the image I wanted to project. Great for a Fortune-500 bank or investment house. Not playful enough for an iPhone software development company.) The second-choice probably didn't take the designer much time. Three simple shapes that overlap to form the logo. I think he just got an inspiration that took him a half-hour to draw. Both approaches are valid, and 99Designs allows you to choose.

In fairness to contestants, once I had leading choices, I stopped making requests of other contestants. No need to run the ragged for nothing. I imagine most contest holders (or at least experienced ones) are pretty fair to contestants this way.

Next time, I will try running a "preliminary design" contest, and a second one (or contract with the winner) for a finished design. Tell the contestants right-off, I'm not looking for a finished design, but design concepts. I think it's useful to be a bit creative with the process. This is the way it often works with a single designer, anyway. You get rough sketches, color palettes, etc. first, then final artwork later. 99De

Let a bunch of people make me suits and then decide whose cut I like the best...it will save me so much and I will look so good! Of course the tailors will never be lining up to do this because their work actually has material costs and takes a reasonable amount of time.

This only works because its not hard to crank out a mediocre website layout or a mediocre design or a mediocre how-to guide. If I am a non-working designer and I have a chance

If I am a non-working designer and I have a chance to spend a few minutes in photoshop designing some logo for your crappy company Cheapskate Inc., it doesn't cost me anything other than time to make a logo of a roller skate with pennies for wheels.

Ooh! I like the way you're thinking! Now, just make me up 6 or 7 full-color variations on this theme - suitable for envelopes, brochures, and billboards - and if I like any, I'll buy one.

It's worth noting that in many other industries where the criteria for determining the product quality is very subjective, bids will often take the form of nearly complete projects.

That's known as "working on spec." I used to work for a very prominent, very expensive packaging design firm in San Francisco, and our firm never, ever, ever did any work on spec. We showed up at a client meeting with nothing for them but a few vague ideas about the power of their brand, their customer base, and their market. No suggestions about color, about package shapes, nothing. You hired us based on the strength of our presentation and our past work and that was all.

Did our competitors ever try to undercut us by showing up with finished package designs before they had even landed the contract? Yes they did, especially as the market tightened. The real old timers found that way of doing business to be completely contemptible, and they attributed it to the young kids entering the field who had no respect for professionalism, etc. etc. But such is life -- times and practices change.

At the same time, many companies respected our track record and the strength of our creative staff enough that they would hire us, without seeing any specific designs, despite the fact that our rates were among the highest in the business. And, frankly, those were the jobs we wanted -- not because they were suckers, but because their jobs gave us the opportunity to continue to build a portfolio of respectable, quality work. There was no point in taking little piecemeal jobs that would pad out our portfolio with junk that looked like the same boring, unimaginative stuff everybody else was doing. We might as well have closed up shop. That would be no way to run a business -- and this 99designs.com, while it didn't exist back then, is evidence of that.

As in almost any field, there's a big difference between hackwork and high-end, professional work. People who want the latter will pay for the latter. In the case of graphic design, they're usually willing to pay for it because they recognize that graphic design is merely a tool to get them what they really want, which is a successful business, and a successful business is something worth investing in.

Welllll, what you say is sort of true, to an extent. You're viewing design work on an excessively etherial level, I think.

YES, it is true that a mid-level designer might have just as easily come up with the AT&T logo. But when AT&T contracts out a brand redesign, what it wants is probably not merely a logo. It wants a brand system that's going to include everything from business cards to stationery to the graphics on the sides of the trucks it rolls out to fix the phone lines. It probably wants one

"A "Brand" is something that requires a large scale organization to be effective."

Nonsense. A business with one single person still has a brand. Even if you have no logo, your name, your reputation, how you present yourself to customers, how you communicate, all form part of your brand identity. A brand does not equal a logo, the logo is simply a symbol that helps communicate elements of your brand identity. Many individual business people use Facebook, twitter, and blogging as a way to market themselves an

Imagine your Boss came to you and said "We're having 10 programmers make the same program, but we'll only pay one of you". That means that 9 of them end up working for free. That's why they hate that business model, no serious graphics designer can make a living out of such contests.

Let's apply the same thing to every highly paid job. We're going to let thousands of doctors offer their diagnosis, but only one of them will get paid. Eventually we can get the cost of everything to almost zero!

A system like this has already been in effect for years. RentACoder (now vworker [vworker.com]) is a site where people post projects and then people bid on how cheaply they can do the work. I use to look at the site and people were bidding in the $teens for developing a CMS

No, it's different. With that site, people place their bids and you choose which one you want to work with. Only after you choose does the person break out their code editor and start programming. With the 99designs model, everybody does the work up-front and tweaks it along the way based on feedback. After getting sometimes thousands of designs [99designs.com] for a few hundred dollar potential payout, the person holding the contest chooses and pays only one.

Except there is no boss, this is freelance contract work. This website is for turning a hobby into a chance to get paid, not steady employment. Bored? Make a logo, post it. Profit, or don't, it's still more money than you'd have gotten paid playing video games all day.

That's exactly what Shirt.Woot [woot.com] does on the weekends - anyone with a (free) Woot account can submit a design, anyone who's bought something from Woot before can say "I'd buy that!". The top three are materialized into actual shirts. Some of the people who submit designs are professional graphical artists, but quite a few people are just interested amateurs.

And frequently, they're far better than anything I've ever seen on any other t-shirt site (and it's only $10, which is pretty good for a designer shirt).

Then most professionals would laugh in your face at such a concept and walk away. Those who want to pay peanuts, end up hiring monkeys. If the business arrangement doesn't suit you, don't enter it. That person would *never* have been your customer anyway because the way they want to scrimp and save and "only pay one person" means they were always looking for a cheap way out - and any *decent* designer wouldn't be satisfied with what they were offering. The designers haven't *lost* any business, they just aren't getting any from a new "auction-style" job market that's cropped up. That's up to them, but it's hardly a jobs nightmare. At any point in history, in any profession, the same thing could have (and has) happened.

No serious graphic designer can make a living out of such contests, so no serious graphic designer will enter such contest. Therefore any work you get through such a contest will not be that of a serious graphic designer. If you need serious graphic design work, you will not use such a contest. Therefore, these contests can't be taking work away from serious graphic designers.

I heard a story on NPR about these guys last weekend or the one before. They say most of the designs submitted take no more time from a designer than it would take for them to bid on a serious project. If they're making bids for free anyway, there's really not much difference to them.

They say most of the designs submitted take no more time from a designer than it would take for them to bid on a serious project. If they're making bids for free anyway, there's really not much difference to them.

the difference is that in the traditional model, you need have some sort of infrastructure built up around you to be successful. you need a portfolio, a suit, a nice haircut, professional references, possibly a job history.

traditional designers object. why? they now have to compete against people that normally would be excluded for reasons other than their skill set.

Ha, here is the problem. Nobody cares if the design is done by a 'professional', or some 12 year old kid. If it looks good, fine, accept it. Nobody is not going to buy from you with your cheaply designed logo, nobody cares.

This is the problem, you are pretending that a professional logo designer is actually better than anyone else. This is not like programming at all. Who cares if the colors blend well, or the font is correct, or the spacing is wrong, or the proportions are incorrect. NOBODY CARES ABOUT THA

Imagine your Boss came to you and said "We're having 10 programmers make the same program, but we'll only pay one of you". That means that 9 of them end up working for free. That's why they hate that business model, no serious graphics designer can make a living out of such contests.

And the decision of who to pay will be made by someone with no expertise in evaluating user interface design, usability, scalability, security, or correctness.

As much as I don't want to bestow special powers to designers, I have met good designers that seem to have a gift. Through training, experience, and natural talent, they can design visuals that direct the eye to the right place, evoke the right emotions, and have lasting impact. Most people cannot consciously distinguish between visuals that hav

..they can design visuals that direct the eye to the right place, evoke the right emotions, and have lasting impact. Most people cannot consciously distinguish between visuals that have those properties and those that do not

Maybe it is my inbuilt distaste for duhsigners, but that sounds very similar to The Emperor's New Clothes.

They're angry because they're established. Expensive suits. Exquisitely designed suites to work in.

How many artists and designers, though, actually make that much of a salary? It's more likely that the "established" artists have to pay rent and buy food and only have so much time during the week to experiment with designs that there's only a 1/100 chance they'll get paid for.

The established way that you get designers together with clients is that the designer will create something - and the client w

So in the brave new world, the client will get 100 designs, none of which will be quite what they want. So they'll go back to the author of the one that came closest and ask for a meeting. At which point that designer can say, "I charge $X hundred for a design but $X thousand for a meeting."

Why bother doing any of that? Why not just have the company say, "None of the hundred designs we got are any good. Pay the best one from this group a pittance, then hold another contest."

They're angry because they're established. Expensive suits. Exquisitely designed suites to work in.

It hurts when your whole business model is built on puff and people start figuring it out.

Graphic designers' business model is not built on puff. Of course, it is in the best interests of business owners who buy the services of graphic designers to lie and claim it is all puff, but that's just a bargaining tactic. In fact, I would have to say that the profession of CEO is built on puff far more than that of graphic designer. Why not crowdsource business decisions? That would certainly cut the outrageous salaries of these well connected upper class twits. CEOs get paid regardless of performance,

Most CEOs are paid partially in salary and partially in stock options. The ones who make ridiculous amounts of money do so in part because under their leadership, their options gained value. There are exceptions, but its rare to see a bad CEO pull in over 8 figures a year.

So a bad CEO only RARELY pulls 100 million? I don't think you're arguing against crowdsourcing his job very well. Shit, I'll run a company badly for 7 figures. I'd go so far as to say I'd do it for midway through 5.

Sorry, it is my business. You see, we have this thing called free speech. Using it, one may express opinions and attempt to sway the opinions of others. I am of the opinion that CEOs, as a class of people, are overpaid for the value they provide society, and I am attempting to convince others to resist the transfer of wealth from the working class to the elite. I understand that these views are not popular with the elite, and they would prefer me not to exercise my free speech, but seeing as how I have little sympathy for the desires of the elite, I don't think I will comply.

Claiming that I am not in the real world, and assuming that I do not and have never owned a business is certainly expressing your opinion, but I would hardly call it civil discourse, and it is unlikely to sway the opinion of anyone not already decided on the matter.

Hopefully, this small lesson in civics will help you understand how society functions.

I'm being honest about where rights come from: agreements between individuals. I'm not advocating using violence, I'm saying, we don't have to agree to do things the way we do. That 'private transaction?' Is it really private? Says who? Two parties arguing over the price of a slave would tell an abolitionist that the transaction is none of their business, and society used to agree with the slavers. Now, thanks to people expressing their opinion, we do not consider that transaction a private matter anymore. I imagine that some transactions we presently see as private will, in the future, be seen as impacting others outside the transaction, and thus not private. CEO pay may well become one of those things that, like slavery, we don't consider a private matter.

You may not believe me, but freedom is my goal. You see, money is power, and someone with money can limit the freedom of someone without. I don't want to end the wealth disparity do much as I want to end the power disparity, which I see as limiting freedom. You probably see the power disparity as a natural consequence of freedom, but 'freedom' is a slippery word that way. Do I have the freedom to swing my fist wherever I like, or do you have the freedom not to get hit in the face? How about pollution? Do I have the right to buy garbage and bury it on my land, or do the externalities involved make that your business, too?

The rich have been taking from the poor for decades now, real income for the bottom 80% of America has been stagnant since the sixties. In the same period, the top 1% has gone from earning 8-9% of the GDP to earning 20% or more. I am advocating that the poor look after their own interests and stop letting the rich take from them.

That is why we have government, to protect the weak from the tyranny of the strong.

Most of them are probably pissed because that dream of running a freelance business out of your cool house in a hip urban neighborhood and being able to write off all your Macintosh crap as a business expense is over.

I often pirate games, don't pay anything for the ones I dislike and I stop playing after one hour (even though it cost someone to create the game) but then buy the ones I enjoy. A lot of people (Not everyone, but a lot of people) find this to be ethical as long as I really pay for the ones I like. What the companies do here is in many ways similar:

You're right, this actually is a pertinent example. A lot of people say that they pirate a lot of games and then go buy the ones they actually like. The tr

I don't think it's "FOSS" as much as the fact that with every generation, people's computer skills are developed at a younger age. In the 1980s, simply being proficient at using a word processor was a marketable skill. Companies held training sessions on how to use Windows. Today, if you show up at a job, it's expected that you know how to use Microsoft Office, surf the web, understand email, etc.

Same thing is happening in other IT skills. I'm not a graphic designer but I know Photoshop as well as someo

If this continues, you will not see a single person their who has a degree above a high school diploma.

if higher education in design does not provide a strong enough competitive advantage in terms of output quality, than such education is a waste of resources and should die off. this isn't medicine or engineering where fuckups kill people. the worse that happens is a design does not win, or a company chooses a crap design and has an ugly logo or website until they figure out that it sucks and change it.

You are severely underestimating the time value of money. While the results may be cheaper than hiring a professional, you have absolutely 0 guarantee you will see something presentable in your desired timeframe. The longer you wait the more opportunities your competitors have to catch up and eventually surpass you, not to mention you may have to idle some of your resources while you wait for a critical component.

While competitions like these may turn a lot of heads because they are so unconventional, i

Not only do I think they're wrong, but even if it was true that workers are overpaid, it still doesn't justify underpaying them. I mean, if you're earning $50 an hour, and someone comes along and wants to pay everyone $3 an hour - what's your response to that? That $50/hour is way too much?

Yes, for much the same reason you will turn your back on toilet paper prices at $15/12 and pick up the cheaper $8/12 pack and wonder what's wrong with the first guy that he charged so much.